CBE requesting less school modernizations due to financial downturn
Posted Mar 11, 2015 5:33 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The Calgary Board of Education is lowering its request to fund modernizations of schools in the province because of the current financial challenge.
Supt. of Facilities and Environmental Services Frank Coppinger spoke Wednesday about the three-year Capital Plan presented to the Board of Trustees, which is now requesting 13 modernizations compared to 24 a year ago.
“We’re trying to be respective of the economic condition in Alberta, so we’ve downgraded our expectation this year,” he said. “Certainly the driver is new schools, but an equal driver is the modernization in order to deliver the curriculum.”
Coppinger said along with meeting curriculum requirements, modernizations are crucial for the city’s old infrastructure.
He said typically a school will last for 50 to 60 years.
“Well look at the number of schools that were built before 1959, we have some 71 schools built before 1959, so they’re getting on to 60-plus years old, they need to be upgraded,” he said.
Coppinger also presented the updated school utilization forecast for next year, which will go up to 89 per cent from 87 this year.
The problem is growing populations are occurring on the fringes of the city, where schools are over capacity resulting in lotteries to get students accepted, as well as high transportation use to bus kids to other schools.
He was asked to explain the consequence of the request of 20 brand new schools not getting approved.
“The over-utilization will be higher in 2020 than it is today and the exact number I’m working on,” he said. “The bottom what does that mean? It means a lot more lotteries, a lot more capping of the number of students you can allow into a school and we’ll have to find a lot more school buses in order to transport all these kids around the city.”
There are currently 31 schools either being modernized or under development.
